APRICOT AND ORANGE BLOSSOM KOLACKY

Makes about 4 dozen kolacky

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS PEOPLE MENTION WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT CHRISTMAS baking Midwest-style is kolacky. Like its Jewish cousin rugelach, kolacky starts with an easy cream cheese dough and is filled with various fillings, usually fruity ones, but they are simpler to form, and they look so pretty tucked into cookie tins.

My kolacky recipe takes advantage of the ease and lightness of a cream cheese dough, and combines it with a scratch-made apricot filling woken up with a tiny bit of orange blossom water—infinitely more flavorful than a canned filling.

DOUGH:

4 ounces/113 g full-fat cream cheese, at room temperature

4 ounces/113 g unsalted butter, at room temperature

3 tablespoons/38 g granulated sugar

1½ teaspoons finely grated orange zest

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

½ teaspoon pure almond extract

½ teaspoon fine sea salt

1 cup/128 g unbleached all-purpose flour, spooned and leveled, plus more for dusting

Confectioners’ sugar for dusting

FILLING:

1 cup Apricot and Orange Blossom Lekvar (here)

Prepare the dough: In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat together the cream cheese, butter, and granulated sugar on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the orange zest, vanilla, almond extract, and salt, and beat for 1 minute more. Reduce the speed to low and gradually stir in the flour. To avoid overmixing, when a few streaks of flour remain finish mixing the dough by hand. Line a work surface with plastic wrap and turn out the dough onto it. Gently pat the dough into a rectangle and wrap tightly. Chill at least 2 hours, or overnight.

Position an oven rack to the center of the oven and preheat it to 350°F/180°C. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper.

To shape the cookies, lightly dust a work surface with flour. Roll out the dough to a rough 13 × 17-inch/33 × 43 cm rectangle, about 1/16-inch/2 mm thick (you need a thin dough to get crisp cookies that don’t unfurl while baking). Re-flour the surface as needed to prevent sticking. Use a pizza cutter to trim ½ inch/1.25 cm from all 4 sides to make a clean, straight-edged 12 × 16-inch/30 × 40 cm rectangle. From there, cut the dough into 4 dozen 2-inch/5 cm squares. Place 1 scant teaspoon of filling in the center of each square, spreading the filling across the square in a diagonal strip. Focusing on the 2 bare corners of the square, fold 1 over the filling, then fold the opposite corner on top, pinching gently to seal.

Place the cookies about 1½ inches/3.8 cm apart on the prepared baking sheets, 2 dozen to a sheet. (Place 1 sheet of cookies in the refrigerator while you bake the first.) Bake until lightly golden at the bottom and edges, about 20 minutes in total, rotating the sheet 180 degrees halfway through the baking time. Let the cookies cool briefly on the baking sheet before transferring them to wire racks to cool completely. Dust generously with confectioners’ sugar. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 5 days.

KOLACKY VS. KOLACHE

(A.K.A. ‘‘HOW DOES YOUR GRANDMA SAY IT?’’)

The differences between kolacky and kolache (here) are blurry at best, but important nonetheless. Across the globe, there are over one hundred pronunciations and spelling variations referring to an Eastern European baked good consisting a simple dough and a filling, usually a fruity one, most traditionally prunes or poppy seeds.

Generally speaking, in the Midwest the cookies you see here are known as kolacky, derivative of the Polish word kolaczki, and pronounced “koh-lah-key,” “koh-latch-key,” and more, mostly depending on whose grandmother is saying it.

Kolache (“koh-lah-chee,” or “koh-lashe,” among others) are the yeasted, bunlike Czech pastries here. Both are old-world recipes, and came to the Midwest with immigrants who often wanted to re-create a taste of home. Czech immigrant and Chicago resident John Sokol helped make that effort a little easier by inventing a line of cake and pastry fillings made from imported European ingredients. Solo brand filling is still on grocery shelves today, with a decades-old kolacky recipe still printed on its labels, which can be found torn from the cans and tucked into countless midwestern recipe boxes. But Solo fillings were only one part of making kolacky a Christmas cookie staple.

The oldest versions of the cookie are made with a butter-based pastry, similar to a shortcrust. But the overwhelmingly popular, modern way to make kolacky is with a cream cheese dough, which wasn’t invented until the 1930s. As a way to promote its cream cheese, Kraft developed the first cream cheese cookie dough, a lightly sweet, flaky, nonleavened dough that caught on like wildfire, particularly with Jewish Americans who were already magicians when it came to cooking and baking with cream cheese. Rugelach, a kolacky cousin and a decidedly American invention, came into existence soon after, and it wasn’t long before other pastry-based cookies, like the kolacky you see here, started switching over to cream cheese dough, too.